Architect rebuilding historic Round Barn destroyed in Tubbs Fire seeks public’s help to finish the project ...Middle East

Ken Moholt-Siebert was sounding relieved, back in late November. As the rainy season closed in, the Santa Rosa-based architect had just finished installing the roof trusses for the passion project he’s building on a hillside above his vineyard on Old Redwood Highway, just south of Cardinal Newman High School.

On a cleft in that hill, visible from Highway 101 and Old Redwood Highway, he has spent the past five years gradually, painstakingly recreating a precise replica of the Fountaingrove Round Barn, a cherished icon to generations of Santa Rosans, which was destroyed in the Tubbs Fire of 2017.

The fire also claimed the home of Ken and his wife, the winemaker Melissa Moholt-Siebert, about a mile north of the Fountaingrove Round Barn. Like thousands of others, the couple felt the loss of that community landmark deeply. In the early stages of rebuilding his own property,  Ken, whom Melissa, describes as a “dreamer” — one steeped in the history of that corner of Sonoma County — decided to resurrect the Round Barn, on land above their upper vineyard “not useful for most other purposes,” he told The Press Democrat in November.

“If I placed it in that location,” he said, “the landmark would be restored, and I could offer it a kind of act of healing and love to this community.”

Now, with the project on the home stretch — Ken has said he hopes to complete the barn by summer’s end — and their funds for the work dwindling, he and Melissa are inviting the community to help them get Round Barn 2.0 across the finish line.

On Wednesday, March 4, Homerun Pizza in Larkfield will be donating 15% of their sales, all day, dine in or takeout, to the rebuild of the Round Barn. The Moholt-Sieberts will be there from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. to answer questions and “tell stories,” said Melissa.

Three days later, on Saturday, March 7, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the Parish Hall of the Church of the Incarnation, at 550 Mendocino Ave. in downtown Santa Rosa, they are hosting a more formal fundraiser, in hopes of finding people ready to donate larger amounts.

Tickets are $100 for the event, which will feature “hearty appetizers,” wines from Ancient Oak Cellars, made by Melissa, and presentations on the project from Ken and others.

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How to help rebuild the Round Barn

When: Wednesday, March 4

Where: Homerun Pizza, 484 Larkfield Center, Larkfield-Wikiup.

What: Restaurant donating 15% of that day’s sales, dine in or takeout.

When: Saturday, March 7, 5 pm to 7 pm

Where: Parish Hall of the Church of the Incarnation, 550 Mendocino Ave, Santa Rosa. Park in the lot around back, or in the lot on the corner of Mendocino Ave. and Cherry St.

What: “Hearty appetizers,” wines from Ancient Oak Cellars, presentations on the project from Ken Moholt-Siebert and others.

Ticket price: $100

There had long been talk of rebuilding the Round Barn. But it ultimately went nowhere. “The challenges of finding land, setting up a 501c3, hiring architects and engineers and contractors, and actually building it seemed insurmountable,” Melissa wrote in an email to supporters of the project.

“Until somebody just crazy enough just did it.”

Her husband went about his quixotic mission “quietly, with no one looking,” she wrote.

“He did it by stretching his fire insurance as far as he could, using his own land, designing it himself, and building it himself, with just a little help.”

Once the roof trusses were installed, Ken didn’t expect to get much done on the project until rainy season ended.

But January was “beautiful and dry,” said Moholt-Siebert, who took advantage of the clement weather to install four rings of purlins – “the horizontal beams that go between the trusses. The roof panels will attach to the purlins.”

And there is the rub.

Those roof panels are not boards. Rather, he’ll use an insulated metal material chosen, in part, for its superior fire resistance.

The panels, which will cost $60,000, are beyond the Moholt-Sieberts’ budget, which is why they’re seeking help from the public.

Among those in attendance at the March 7 event at The Church of the Incarnation will be relatives of Kanaye Nagasawa, the scion of a samurai family who was the first Japanese immigrant to permanently reside in the USA.

In the late 19th century, Nagasawa became manager of a 2,000-acre utopian settlement, including an internationally renowned vineyard, called The Brotherhood of New Life, located in present-day Fountaingrove.

When the community founder, Thomas Lake Harris, returned to Scotland in 1892, followed by a whiff of scandal, Nagasawa inherited the land, running the vineyard with such success – producing over 200,000 gallons per year, at its peak – eventually becoming known in Japan as “The Wine King of California.”

In 1898, he commissioned the construction of a 72-foot-in-diameter, 16-sided barn to house the vineyard’s workhorses – a structure that stood prominently, serving as a kind of sentinel at the northern approach to Santa  Rosa, for the next 118 years.

Nagasawa had no children. Before his death in 1934, he willed the land to his nephew, an American citizen named Tomoki Ijichi, and Tomoki’s wife, Hiro. Due to the California Alien Land Law, however, the property was taken from them. In 1942, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Tomoki and Hiro and their children, Kosuke and Amy, were relocated to an internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, for the duration of World War II.

Kosuke Ijichi, a graduate of Santa Rosa High School, was the father of Karen Ijichi Perkins, who now lives in Oakland. Last fall she and three of her siblings, along with two of their cousins, visited the Moholt-Siebert ranch, to see the rebuilt Round-Barn-in-progress, which she described as “an immense project,” and “beautiful.”

“It means a lot to our family,” she said.

Ken wanted Perkins and her siblings and cousins to see the barn with their own eyes, he said, “because it’s really theirs, not mine. I mean, it’s a community story. But they’re the beginning of it.”

Making the history of the Round Barn “unique and special,” he added, is Kanaye Nagasawa, “one of the first people to leave Japan and explore the world outside of it, who ends up being the Wine King of California.”

That triumph was tempered, he added “by the tragic aspect of his family being separated from the land that should have been their legacy.”

The rebuild barn “doesn’t restore to them what they lost, in any material way,” he said. “But in a symbolic way, maybe it can be a step in the right direction.”

You can reach senior reporter Austin Murphy at [email protected]. On X @Ausmurph88.

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